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Chef Who Refuses to Be Defined by His Wok

“I want to prove you don’t need to have academic syntax to be intelligent,” Eddie Huang says.Credit
Evan Sung for The New York Times

The firebrand chef Eddie Huang took over a table at Hot Kitchen, a Sichuan restaurant in the East Village, and commandeered the remote control. It was a Saturday night, and the Orlando Magic was losing to the New York Knicks. As Carmelo Anthony worked his way to 40 points, Mr. Huang’s body jerked in sympathetic rebound.

Mr. Huang’s face was framed by a crisp black New Yorker baseball cap. On his pinkie was a ring emblazoned with a Star of David; on his wrist a Nike+ FuelBand; and on his torso was an oversized black hoodie with the letters “P-I-F” emblazoned on the front.

At 30, Mr. Huang is usually identified as a chef, which is only partly true. He is the chef and co-owner of BaoHaus, an informal Taiwanese bun shop in the East Village. But, he is quick to add, “I have more to say as a writer than from behind a wok.”

He has berated fellow chefs like Marcus Samuelsson and David Chang as exploiters and sellouts. On his online recaps, he has attacked the HBO show “Girls” as elitist. He has excoriated Guy Fieri as a cruel joke, and he pontificates on divisive topics like interracial dating and shark fin soup.

He disseminates these broadsides on his blog, Fresh Off The Boat; through his active Twitter account, @MrEddieHuang; on a popular Vice online series called Fresh Off The Boat; and in a memoir of the same name, published this month by Random House.

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The chef Eddie Huang at BaoHaus in the East Village.Credit
Evan Sung for The New York Times

Mr. Huang’s path has been nomadic and unsteady. Raised in Orlando, Fla., he moved to New York in 2005 to study at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. “Yo, I was the president of the Minority Law Students Alliance,” he said. “It was ill.”

After graduating, he practiced corporate law at Chadbourne & Parke but was laid off in March 2009. Rather than continue law, he found work as a stand-up comic at the Laugh Lounge on the Lower East Side. Using the stage name Magic Dong Huang, he was a loud and high-energy figure, telling jokes about soy milk, Osama bin Laden and growing up Chinese in Orlando.

“My only goal as a comedian was to stomp the life out of the model-minority myth,” he writes in the memoir. To make ends meet, he said, he also ran a loose network of marijuana dealers. “I had other comics selling my weed,” he said.

Seeking greater exposure, Mr. Huang appeared on the Food Network show “Ultimate Recipe Showdown,” hosted by Mr. Fieri. Although he did not win, the show gave him the confidence to open BaoHaus with his brother, Evan, just nine months after being laid off.

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"Mr. Huang has a Vice series called, "Fresh Off The Boat"Credit
VICE

Crammed into a basement space on Rivington Street, it served savory bite-sized buns for a few dollars and “was meant to be like a futuristic Y.M.C.A., where all the weirdos could hang out,” he said.

Six months later, he opened a full-service restaurant, Xiao Ye, which served dishes like Cheeto-Fried Chicken and ran specials like Four Loko Thursdays, based on the banned energy drink. The critics were brutal. “Xiao Ye is a bummer,” wrote Sam Sifton in a blistering review in The New York Times, rating it “fair.”

“The review was a wake-up call,” Mr. Huang said. “I realized I couldn’t play hard and work hard. So I decided to dedicate myself, but not in the way people expected. I realized it is time to do what I came here for, to speak my mind and to talk about all the things about America I’d like to change.”

Eventually Xiao Ye closed, and Mr. Huang, with extra time on his hands, began to speak out. He criticized Mr. Samuelsson for exploiting the African-American experience at the Red Rooster in an article he wrote for The New York Observer. He criticized Mr. Chang for debasing his food for the Western palate, and took on Western chefs for cooking ethnic food.

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A scene from "Fresh Off the Boat."Credit
VICE

Mr. Huang went fishing with Tom Colicchio and banged around Brooklyn with Anthony Bourdain. He ignited Twitter wars with Food Network stars like Anne Burrell, calling her “fish filet.” He is giving a TED Talk this year on the shifting waltz between authenticity and ethnicity.

“I want to prove you don’t need to have academic syntax to be intelligent,” he said.

Mr. Huang’s appeal is not only in what he says, but how he says it — a profane concatenation of Mandarin and African-American vernacular English, spiced with allusions to Jonathan Swift, Charles Barkley and Cam’ron.

Although he grew up in suburban Orlando, Mr. Huang was nevertheless deeply influenced by hip-hop culture, and his lexicon is the stuff of Tipper Gore’s nightmares. In a recent Vice episode, Mr. Huang introduced himself by saying: “What up? It’s your boy Eddie Huang. Writer. Chef. Human panda. BangBros connoisseur, and I’m horny for more.” Then he asks a passer-by for a marijuana cigarette.

Mr. Huang’s memoir reads like a Taiwanese-American hip-hop version of “Journey to the End of the Night” — an anarchic catalog of small triumphs and horrific scenes of physical abuse. According to the memoir, the abuse came at the hands of Mr. Huang’s father, a former Taiwanese gang-leader-cum-Orlando restaurateur, and his mother, a high-strung housewife.

Video

Trailer: ‘Fresh Off the Boat’

Vice.com teams up with Eddie Huang of Baohaus to present a new Web series.

That led, in part, to Mr. Huang’s identification with black culture. “I remember black parents would hit their kids at the grocery store when they bruised the fruit,” he said. “I remember getting hit by my mother when I bruised the fruit, too. I thought, ‘I guess I’m more like them than the white kids.’ ”

Today, Mr. Huang lives in a small apartment in Stuyvesant Town with his brother and 120 pairs of sneakers. There are hundred of N.B.A. video games on a shelf and two unopened bottle of Hennessy V.S.O.P. on the table. “I always have two bottles of Hennessy in case something happens,” Mr. Huang said cryptically.

The kitchen has fallen into disrepair, but Mr. Huang is rarely home anyway. When he is not traveling for Vice, he is behind the counter at BaoHaus, now on East 14th Street.

He was there on a recent afternoon, in an apron and gray sweatshirt, as the hip-hop song “Ambition” by Wale blasted overhead. Mr. Huang’s face was obscured by thick clouds of steam, but his voice could be heard.

“Easy to dream but harder to live it,” he sang along to the music. “They’re going to love me for my ambition.”

Correction: January 24, 2013

An earlier version of a photo caption associated with this article online misstated the name of Eddie Huang’s show. It is “Fresh Off the Boat” not “Munchies.” “Munchies” is a show on Vice, which Mr. Huang was featured on.

A version of this article appears in print on January 24, 2013, on page E1 of the New York edition with the headline: Chef Who Refuses to Be Defined by His Wok. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe